but an intellectual adjustment as well, an ability to see the relations between things, to look behind their surface and perceive their meaning not alone to the individual, but to the community as well. “The best way of making sure that children learn this double adjustment is,” says the American school-teacher, “to give them work which represents truly the conditions they have to deal with out of school.”
Solving problems in school as they would have to be met out of school.
(Francis Parker School, Chicago.)
Outside the classroom the child is constantly having to bend material things to his own needs, and to satisfy the demands that are made upon him because he lives with other people. If he is to accomplish this successfully for himself and others it is important that he learn to see things as they are; that he be able to use his senses accurately to understand the meaning that things and people have to and for him as a member of society. Hence the need of freedom to meet and solve these problems in school, much as one has to do out of school. Madame Montessori, on the other hand, believes that the technique of living can best be learned by the child through situations that are not typical of social life, but which have been arranged in order to exercise some special sense so as to develop the faculties of discrimination and comparison.
The difference of opinion resolves itself into the acceptance of different views of the nature of the human intelligence. Montessori, in common with the older psychologists, believes that people have ready-made faculties which can be trained and developed for general purposes, regardless of whether the acts by which they are exercised have any meaning other than the training they afford. The child is born with undeveloped faculties which can be made to blossom by suitable appliances, and then devoted at will to other uses. Most educators in this country agree with the newer psychological theories that skill can not be achieved independently of the tools used and the object fashioned in the accomplishment of a special end. Exercises which distinguish for the child the abstract qualities like length and color, regardless of the things of which they are qualities, may give the child great skill in performing the special exercise, but will not necessarily result in making him more successful in dealing with these qualities as they appear as factors in the situations of life. Much less will they train powers of comparing and discriminating at large so that they may be transferred to any use. A child is not born with faculties to be unfolded, but with special impulses of action to be developed through their use in preserving and perfecting life in the social and physical conditions under which it goes on.
If, accordingly, the child in an American progressive school does not usually have as much freedom of moving about and of choice of his time for doing work, the explanation does not consist in a less degree of belief in the value of liberty. The emphasis falls on the larger freedom of using and testing senses and judgment in situations typical of life. Because these situations are social, they require that children work more together in common pursuits; because they are social they permit and often require the teacher’s aid, just as one gains assistance from others in the ordinary affairs of life. Help from others is not to be feared as an encroachment upon liberty, but that kind of help which restricts the use of the children’s own intelligence in forming ends and using ingenuity, initiative and inventiveness in the selection and adaption of materials. The limitation of material to performing exercises calculated to train an isolated sense—a situation that never presents itself in life—seems to the American teacher a greater limitation of freedom than that which arises from the need of coöperation with others in the performance of common activities. It is desirable not merely that the child should learn not to interfere with others as they execute their own ends, but also that he should learn to work with them in an intelligent way. Hence the scope of the material should not be limited to training the discriminations and comparisons of a single sense (however valuable this may be with very young children who are incapable of coöperative activity and whose main business is to master the use of their organs),1 but should be varied enough to offer typical problems calling for the kind of comparison and discrimination used in ordinary life-situations. And when pupils are making real things for real uses, or finding out about the activities and materials of out-of-school life, several children need to work at the same thing and keep at one thing with some consecutiveness.
But if the educators of this country differ with Montessori as to the existence of innate faculties which can be trained for general application by special exercises designed only for training and not for the accomplishment of results in which training is incidental, they welcome her efforts to secure that degree of freedom in the schoolroom which will enable teachers to become acquainted with the real powers and interests of the child and thus secure the data for a scientific method in education. They appreciate the force of her point that artificial conditions of restraint prevent teachers from getting true knowledge of the material with which they are dealing, so that instruction is limited to repetition of traditional processes. They perceive that her insistence upon touch associated with muscular movement as a factor in learning to write and read, is a real contribution to the technique of elementary instruction. She has become a most important factor in the popularizing of the gospel of liberty as indispensable to any true education.
With a wider understanding of the meaning of intellectual and moral freedom, and the accompanying breakdown of the negative and coercive ideas of discipline, the chief obstacle to the use of the teacher’s own powers of observation and experimentation will disappear. The scientific interest which requires personal observation, reflection, and experimental activity, will be added to the teacher’s sympathetic interest in the welfare of children. Education that associates learning with doing will replace the passive education of imparting the learning of others. However well the latter is adapted to feudal societies, in which most individuals are expected to submit constantly and docilely to the authority of superiors, an education which proceeds on this basis is inconsistent with a democratic society where initiative and independence are the rule and where every citizen is supposed to take part in the conduct of affairs of common interest. It is significant of the wide-reaching development of the democratic spirit that the voice most influentially identified at the present time with the ideal of liberty in education should sound forth from Italy.
1. It is significant that many who have experimented with the apparatus hold that its value is greatest with quite young children—three and four years old.
Chapter VII
The Relation Of The School To The Community
Work is essentially social in its character, for the occupations which people carry on are for human needs and ends. They are concerned with maintaining the relations with things and with others which make up the world we live in. Even the acts that are concerned with keeping alive are arranged to fit into a social scheme which has modified all man’s instinctive acts and thoughts. Everything about this scheme is dependent upon the ability of people to work together successfully. If they can do this a well-balanced, happy and prosperous society results. Without these occupations, which are essentially social life—that is human life—civilization can not go on. The result is a sort of social education by necessity, since every one must learn to adapt himself to other individuals and to whole communities. When it is left to circumstances this education, although necessary, is haphazard and only partial. We send children to school supposedly to learn in a systematic way the occupations which constitute living, but to a very large extent the schools overlook, in the methods and subject-matter of their teaching, the social basis of living. Instead of centering the work in the concrete, the human side of things, they put the emphasis on the abstract, hence the work is made academic—unsocial. Work then is no longer connected with a group
